Startup Chestnut Carbon has raised $160 million to plant, restore and manage trees on degraded farmland, generating carbon credits for customers that include Microsoft Corp.

The company’s goal: Providing high-quality, nature-based credits that sidestep issues that have plagued carbon markets.

The Series B round, led by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Cloverlay Investment Management LLC, comes less than a month after Chestnut signed an agreement with Microsoft to provide 7 million tons of carbon removal credits. That’s the second-largest carbon removal agreement the tech giant has struck. With a number of tech companies struggling to meet their climate targets due to a surge in energy-intensive data centers, carbon removal has taken on added importance.

Nature-based carbon projects have come under scrutiny for delivering low-quality credits and don’t help the climate as much as they promise. That sowed distrust in the market and led to a downturn in the number of credits purchased.

Chestnut’s approach addresses the “credibility crisis” of the nature-based carbon market, said investor Nancy Pfund, the founder and managing partner of DBL Partners, which participated in the raise. Many of the company’s projects involve purchasing non-performing agricultural and pasture lands and planting trees rather than paying farmers to do so. About 80% to 90% of project costs are land purchases, which will allow Chestnut to better assess afforestation efforts. The company has also developed a proprietary device that helps measure and track how much carbon is removed by their projects.

“We can deliver the credits and at scale,” said Chief Executive Officer Ben Dell, who is also the founder and managing partner of energy investor Kimmeridge Energy Management Co.

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